Free My Brother Louis Measures Worms by Barbara Robinson Page B

disjointed, but downright loony.
    As my father later said, it was now clear to him that from time to time—indeed, frequently —something came over Mother; she would get in the car and drive somewhere (Fredonia, Concord) and then come to her senses and, exactly as she had told him, not know why she was wherever she was. The reference to fish struck him as an attempt on her part to hang onto reality: home, family, routine household matters.
    It was at this point that he told Louis and me that Mother was not well, for he pictured a rocky time ahead and wanted to prepare us. He also planned to sit down quietly with Mother and try to talk about it—but then Mother came home with an enormous fish, complete with head and tail, opened the refrigerator and said, “Why, here’s a meat loaf!”
    She had forgotten about the meat loaf in all the confusion of the day, but her tone and choice of words suggested that she had never known anything about it in the first place. This convinced my father that she was in worse shape than he thought and needed more help than he could provide.
    From here on, events marched off in all directions.
    My father consulted Dr. Hildebrand, who said that Mother was the last person alive he would expect to go off her rocker; that if she had, it was out of his line; but that he would set up an appointment with her for a regular checkup and see what he could conclude.
    He subsequently reported that Mother appeared to him to be perfectly sane, though overconcerned about her sister Rhoda, and that to satisfy Mother, he had set up an appointment for Rhoda.
    Following that consultation he told my father that if anyone had a problem it was Rhoda. “She’s got pregnancy on the brain,” he said. “Doesn’t want to talk about diet and blood pressure. Wants to talk about babies; who has ’em, who wants ’em. I don’t know”—he shook his head—“have to keep an eye on her.”
    Still, my father was not encouraged. Mother appeared to him to be perfectly sane, too, most of the time—but what about her amnesia jaunts to Fredonia and Concord? What about the meat loaf and the fish?
    Meanwhile Louis and I were still waiting to be told about the baby, and Aunt Rhoda continued to come and go, waiting for Mother to break down and reveal whatever was troubling her and making her do the strange things my father said she did, and Mother went right on scrambling around the countryside from one flower show to another.
    After the luncheon-lecture incident she was extremely cautious about following cars; but, as she later said, this system had worked for her more times than it hadn’t. . . . When she next found herself heading into strange country with sketchy directions ( Trn rt at chkn frm; tke scd rt Briley? Borly? ) she looked around for something likely . . . and found it, in a car whose rear window was literally abloom with pink and white blossoms.
    She couldn’t see the driver or the passengers, but neither had she seen anything along the road that might be a “chkn frm” and time was ticking by; so when this car turned off the highway she followed it.
    The first thing that met her eye was a large billboard advertising Brown-Broast Broilers, which she took to be the Briley or Borly of her directions; and so she proceeded, confident and pleased with herself, until the flowery car stopped in front of the bank, and out stepped my father.
    She had already pulled in behind him and there was no escape; but at least, as she said, this time the shoe was on the other foot. What was he doing in somebody else’s car full of flowers? she demanded. And what was he doing here in Albion?
    First of all, my father told her (gently, he later insisted), they weren’t in Albion, but in Conneaut; he was here to make a business call; he was driving George Colgate’s car because George asked him to; the flowers were all petunia plants to be